The Bookworm Beat (10/3/14) — End of the week roundup and Open Thread

Yesterday I pointed out that, in all times and all places, protecting a population from epidemic disease is one of government’s core functions. (It’s irrelevant that these efforts often failed; government was still expected to make them.) Obama is failing that most basic government task. Not only do we have Ebola in Dallas, with exposures going into the hundreds, it appears that Ebola has entered Washington D.C. too.

What’s striking about Ebola’s spread into the U.S. is that it’s not just an Obama failure, it’s a Big Government failure. The Obama failure begins with his absolute refusal to protect our air, land, and sea borders. The Big Government failure goes to Obama’s certainty that he needn’t do anything special to combat Ebola because Big Government will be sufficient in and of itself to protect us:

The chances of an Ebola outbreak in the United States are “extremely low,” Obama said. U.S. are working with officials in Africa “to increase screening at airports so that someone with the virus doesn’t get on a plane for the United States.” And then this:

In the unlikely event that someone with Ebola does reach our shores, we’ve taken new measures so that we’re prepared here at home. We’re working to help flight crews identify people who are sick, and more labs across our country now have the capacity to quickly test for the virus. We’re working with hospitals to make sure that they are prepared, and to ensure that our doctors, our nurses and our medical staff are trained, are ready, and are able to deal with a possible case safely.

Obama added that in the unlikely event an Ebola case appeared in the United States, “we have world-class facilities and professionals ready to respond. And we have effective surveillance mechanisms in place.”

As Rich Lowry explains in the article from which I quoted, everything Obama assumed about his wonderful Big Government was wrong. Rather than blocking Ebola, Big Government just provided that many more cracks through which the virus could slip.

Scratch an anti-gun Leftist; find a blood-thirsty killer

When news about Ebola in Dallas broke, one of my old high school friends, who has had a political trajectory precisely the opposite of mine (from moderate guy to hard-core Leftist), voiced the wish that the patient had, instead, been in Austin (Texas’s state capitol) and that, while there, he had spread bodily fluids on the Republican politicians, starting with Governor Perry. When I politely pressed him for a reason, he explained that it was because these politicians had cut back government services, adding belatedly that he was just kidding.

Sometimes, though, Leftists go from “just kidding” to “let’s kill them.” Charles C.W. Cooke looks at anti-gun Leftists who want to use SWATting tactics to try to kill legal gun carriers. That is, when they see someone with legal open carry, they are proposing that they should call 911 and describe a dangerous situation in the hope that the SWAT teams will show up and, expecting the worst, just kill the guy with legal carry.

Indeed, Cooke, who spoke with gun-expert extraordinaire Bob Owens, writes at Bearing Arms, suggests that this is precisely what may have happened to John Crawford at the Ohio Wal-Mart:

[Crawford] was killed because, to borrow a phrase from Lisa McLogan Shaheen, a fellow shopper “called 911 so the cops could gun him down.” “If you sync the phone call to the footage,” Bob Owens tells me, “you’ll notice that Ronald Ritchie, the caller, makes claims that are not true.” Among those claims, the Guardian records, were that “Crawford was pointing the air rifle at customers,” that he threatened “two children,” and that he was recklessly “waving it around.” This does not appear to have been the case. Indeed, when the lattermost statement was made, Owens notes, “the gun’s muzzle was pointed to the ground.” So pronounced are the discrepancies between Ritchie’s story and the surveillance footage that John Crawford’s family is hoping to take legal action. “He’s basically lying with the dispatchers,” the family’s attorney, Michael Wright argues. “He’s making up the story. So should he be prosecuted? Yes, I believe so.”

“Who will rid us of these troublesome gun owners?” the radical Leftists cry out . . . and then use America’s police officers as their unwitting executioners.

Did Jerry Brown sign a good gun bill or a bad gun bill?

I am reflexively opposed to any government interference with gun rights . . . except that I’m wondering whether the bill that Gov. Brown just signed in California might actually have some merit. The new bill allows family members who are concerned about another family member’s gun possession to petition to the court to have the gun(s) taken away.

On the one hand, the bill is another erosion of gun rights and allows anti-gun people to wipe out the gun rights of their pro-gun relatives. Moreover, as we can see from the SWATting tactics above, it’s not unreasonable to believe that Leftist family members won’t take advantage of this law. On the other hand, when someone is becoming dangerous, the family is often the first to know, long before the medical or criminal justice systems catch up.

And then back to the first hand, which is that, if you give the government an inch to grab guns, it will take, not just a mile, but a thousand miles…. Which leads me to the thought that this may be a reasonable law, but one that can’t ever be entrusted to the government to effectuate.

Please tell me what you think. I’m quite obviously conflicted here, in part because I know of several young men who, in their 20s, become schizophrenic, with the family being the first to see that their sweet young boy was becoming scary and dangerous.

History has yet to be written

Jonah Goldberg often attacks the Leftists’ claim that they’re on the right side of history. The old cliché that history belongs to the victors is at least somewhat more accurate, because it at least looks at history as a thing of the past not as a prediction for the future.

In his latest article, Goldberg points out that one of the problems with the “right side of history” argument is that it’s predicated on the speaker’s belief that events will unfold without any unexpected deviations from plan. When the plans change, as the best laid of them tend to do, the person betting on historic certainty looks foolish at best:

The dilemma for the president is that the once-solid facts that supported these views are suddenly crumbling under his feet. The argument that the fight against jihadism can be managed like law enforcement is easy to make when terrorism is out of the headlines and drones do the messy work out of sight. That same argument is very hard to sustain when the jihadis control territory equal in size to Great Britain and, when not beheading Americans, they vow to fly their flag over the White House. The idea that men who crucify Christians and bury women and children alive would somehow be dissuaded if we closed down the prison at Guantanamo Bay is almost perversely idiotic.

Obama’s love affair with a killer

In 2008, Obama sent an explicit, secret message to Iran, saying in effect “I love you, guys, and I’ll take care of you.” That was one promise he kept. Throughout his presidency, Obama, both actively and passively has worked hard to keep the mullahs in power and their nuclear program on track. He seems to believe that, if he can just be nice to them, they’ll respond by being nice right back to us.

It’s a pity that Obama hates Churchill so much. If he liked him better, Obama be familiar with Churchill’s famous aphorism that “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” That hope, of course, is invariably wrong.

The only good thing to come out of that second report is this little tidbit (emphasis mine):

On September 29, [political prisoner Reyhaneh] Jabbari was seized by prison guards during her shower, forced to dress and told that she would be hanged in the morning. After the prison staff allowed her to make one last phone call to her mother, she was transferred to Rajai-Shahr prison and placed in solitary confinement to await execution at dawn.

Upon her daughter’s transfer, Jabbari’s mother, Shole Pakravan, rushed to Rajai-Shahr prison with her husband, two daughters and a few friends. In front of the prison a crowd grew quickly to protest Jabbari’s execution. Prison authorities ordered the crowd to leave and assured Jabbari’s family that she was not to be hanged — a statement the authorities commonly make before an execution so it can be carried out quietly, without incident.

That rope with which the mad mullahs hang dissidents may end up being the rope with which they hang themselves. It speaks to their waning power that Iranians will protest executions and that the mullahs will lie to pacify them, rather than just killing them on the spot.

And no, in answer to your unspoken question, I don’t think these news reports will actually change Obama’s mind. He is a hard-core ideologue and they just don’t change. But I can still dream….

Bureaucracy kills the Secret Service

For more than a century, the Secret Service was a lean, mean fighting machine operating under the aegis of the Treasury Department. Then, George Bush transferred it to Homeland Security, where it became just another bureaucratic beast. Kevin Williamson writes scathingly about the way in which bureaucracy is slowly destroying the agency charged with keeping our president safe.

I share with Thomas Lifson the belief that it’s imperative to keep Obama alive. His death in office, God forbid, could well destroy this country. And having written that sentence, I should add that no president, ever, should be assassinated. Assassination is not only cold-blooded murder, it is a psychic blow to a nation and the most profoundly anti-democratic act of all.

Transgenderism is only skin deep

The other day, I wrote about the importance of recognizing the substance that lies under any form, with special reference to transgender people. I argued that, when people make cosmetic, hormonal, and surgical changes to their appearance so that they look like a person of the opposite sex, that doesn’t change their genetic essence. While it’s kind and polite to address them as they wish to be addressed, we should never blind ourselves to the reality of who and what they really are.

One British man who had male to female gender reassignment surgery a decade ago, is petitioning the British health care service to reassign him to his original gender appearance. His argument echoes what I’ve been saying all along:

Chelsea, who used to be called Matthew, told the Daily Mirror: “I have always longed to be a woman, but no amount of surgery can give me an actual female body and I feel like I am living a lie.

“It is exhausting putting on make-up and wearing heels all the time. Even then I don’t feel I look like a proper woman. I suffered from depression and anxiety as a result of the hormones too.

“I have realised it would be easier to stop fighting the way I look naturally and accept that I was born a man physically.”

I wonder what the NHS will do. It’s wonderfully politically correct to withdraw funding from an old lady with cancer so as to give it to a young man who wants breasts. Where’s the political correctness, though, when the young man concedes that the problem was never with his appearance at all?

High educated liberals as low information voters

Roger L. Simon lives in the Southern California version of my Marin world: His neighbors are well-intentioned, affluent, and highly-credentialed people who almost invariably hew Left politically. Indeed, those few of my friends and neighbors who know I’ve become conservative point to themselves — affluent and educated — and ask how I can be conservative when the smart people support the Democrats.

Simon has the answer for that and, again, it echoes what I see in my world: These people may have degrees, know about wine, and have seen the capitals of Europe, but they’re fundamentally ignorant about the key issues shaping the world today.

California has fired the first salvo in what could be a national war on plastic bags.

Governor Edmund Brown [sic, since he usually goes by Jerry] on Tuesday signed into law a bill that bans plastic shopping bags, making California the first U.S. state to officially prohibit stores from handing them out for free.

“This bill is a step in the right direction — it reduces the torrent of plastic polluting our beaches, parks and even the vast ocean itself,” Brown said in a statement. “We’re the first to ban these bags, and we won’t be the last.”

The ban is a victory for environmentalists who say the 13 million plastic bags that are handed out each year in the state end up in waterways and landfills where they don’t break down for decades. Critics argue that the ban is misguided and will cost American jobs.

The new law goes into effect for large grocery chains and pharmacies beginning July 1, 2015. It will extend to convenience stores and liquor stores July 1, 2016.
Under the law, stores will be required to offer customers recycled paper bags or bags made of compostable material at a cost of at least 10 cents. Consumers buying groceries using California’s food-assistance program won’t have to pay for bags.

For me, the ban is nothing new, since it’s already enforced in parts of Marin. Corte Madera stores haven’t been applying either the ban or the “pay 10 cents” requirement, so I prefer shopping in Corte Madera over Mill Valley, which does ban plastic and makes you pay for paper.

I’ve written before about the fact that this ban steams me. I don’t mind if other people want to go around looking like bag ladies with their stacks of dirty cloth and plastic bags, but (a) I don’t want to look like a bag lady; (b) I’d have to use insane amounts of water to keep those bags from being salmonella and e. coli breeding grounds; and (c) even a 10 cent penalty is still a penalty and I don’t believe I should be penalized in this way.

It’s balm to my offended soul to read a PRI study saying that, as is the case with most of the Left’s wild hairs, they’ve got it wrong when it comes to the supposed virtues of banning disposable paper and plastic bags:

Proponents of bag-bans omit the most important consideration, which is what replaces the plastic bags? Other bags (including cloth) have even worse environmental impact profiles, and pose additional risks of cross-contaminating food and spreading dangerous pathogens among those who share the bags.

Increasingly, studies suggest that as with other poorly-thought out environmental intervention; banning plastic grocery bags reduces some harms, while increasing others.

And more environmental news about Leftist’s continued errors

Both these stories come to me thanks to Danny Lemieux. The first story says that, once again, scientists were wrong, this time with regard to the anticipated shrimp die-off in the Gulf following the BP oil spill. In fact, the shrimp seem to like that oil:

Looking at the abundance and size of Louisiana white and brown shrimp before and after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a scientific paper published Wednesday said the amount of shrimp actually increased in local estuaries through 2011 and that the size of that shrimp remained unaffected.

[snip]

Van der Ham and De Mutsert’s study compared abundance and size of shrimp in estuaries that were heavily impacted by the spill with minimally-impacted estuaries, both before and after the spill.

It found that shrimp actually was more abundant in areas heavily impacted by the oil spill.

“The rebound to normal abundance and the absence of any effect on shrimp size agrees with the view that the spill may have negligible long-term effects on Louisiana shrimp,” the study concluded. “However, long-term effects of the spill on shrimp may manifest in other traits, such as compromised immunological or life-history traits.

Don’t you just love that last paragraph? What the study’s authors could have said was “we are still studying whether there are other long-term effects on the shrimp.” But they don’t. Instead, they imply that there must in fact be negative long-term effects on the shrimp, just waiting to be found. That’s the difference, I guess, between true scientific inquiry and ideologically-driven inquiry.

The second story is about those “green” wind farms. They’re killing hundreds of thousands of precious bats (which fertilizer crops and are otherwise environmentally useful) because they mimic the wind pattern of trees.

One French woman deserves a medal for her bravery

Check out this picture and tell me if this isn’t one seriously brave French woman.

And one West African woman deserves a medal too

Fatu Kekula, a 22-year-old nursing student in West Africa, using nothing more than courage, common sense, and garbage bags, nursed three out of four stricken family members through Ebola without becoming infected herself. What an amazing story of intelligence and decency in action.

Watcher’s Council Weasel of the Week

Don’t forget to check out this Week’s winner in the Watcher’s Council Weasel of the Week contest. My daughter came in as I was casting my vote by email. She saw “I vote for ____________.” She was shocked. “But you hate ____________.” When I explained the type of vote I was casting, it all became clear to her.

Picture!

I’m not yet ready for an illustrated edition today, but this poster that a friend sent me is so good, I didn’t want to wait before sharing it:

Banning plastic bags. An effective way to promote the spread of bacteria and viruses.

JKB

FEMA’s response to New Orleans is looking pretty good compared to the CDC’s response to Ebola.

FEMA had a few hours notice and the full extent of the disaster didn’t hit until DC had evacuated for the Labor Day weekend.

CDC has had years of knowing of the Ebola outbreaks and months of notice on this current outbreak. And while earlier, the Progressive MSM was parroting the “unlikely” to come to the US message, now they have moved on to the “inevitable”. If it was inevitable, shouldn’t the CDC have been prepared?

Not to mention the CDC won’t even institute “active” screening of passengers who’ve been in West Africa in the last month on the US side. Nor do they have recommendations and procedures as to what to do about the infectious waste at the Dallas patient’s apartment or where he threw up outside in the common area. And that stuff has been their for days. The complex used a power washer which would create a possibly infectious mist.

Also, it’s only been 9 years since “big government”, i.e., FEMA, was shown to be incompetent in its basic functions.

JKB

We have an effective way to scramble our government. Over 50% chose not to use the method in 2012. In 2016, it will happen regardless. No good would come of trying to pre-empt that change. We just have to ride this HST to the end of the line.

But also, from a partisan view, I refer to Captain Malcolm Reynolds:

“Dead horse, cover. Live horse, pile of panic.”

It is of advantage to have Obama, et al, thrashing about as we go into 2016. Obama will not go into the night quietly, even if required Constitutionally.

Blick4343

Re Ebola: How’s about the sewer system. Bodily fluids are flushed and how long does the ebola virus live outside of a host. Do rats, mice, roaches, become carriers? Or is it just wild animals in Africa? CDC is being politically correct not medically correct. Corruption flows downhill.

Re anti gunners: The anti-gun movement is mainly an emotional response to guns. It is fear, misunderstanding, helplessness, and scary guns. People don’t fear cars, yet cars kill more people a year than guns. People understand cars, and use cars daily, the driving rules are understood, and cars are familiar. Anti-gunners, out of their fear, seek to impose their fear on others. The FBI statistics prove my point.

lee

I despise plastic bag bans I loved for several years on a shoestring budget, and those grocery bags made a huge difference for me–I did not have to buy any garbage bags, I just reused the grocery store bags. They were perfect for the garbage chute. These bans make tree huggers feel good, but they penalize the poor.

Thomas Lifson…
At work the other day one of my coworkers was very upset. She is black. She is very sweet. She was fulminating at all these people who want to kill Obama just because he’s black. She was almost in tears about it. But the things she said also made me feel really uncomfortable. It was clear that she really believes that white people hate Obama just because he is black. And that most white people at minimum wish he were dead–just because he’s black. Now she’s in her sixties, and she grew up here in the south, so she probably has a perspective informed by that history.

JKB

I found this post about the plastic bag ban interesting. Plastic bags are now a valuable resource worthy of theft

Not clear enough about what I meant by “uncomfortable.” She was reading on whites in such a way that had it been about any minority, it would have been actionable by HR. But because it was about whites, I knew it was pointless to c complain to anyone. (Especially HR–all the HR people are black.)

Ron19

California bans all plastic bags.

Great.

Instead of getting 2-use (groceries and trash bag liners) plastic bags with the cost built into the price of the groceries, I will now have to buy just as many plastic trash bags to line my trash cans , and use as an instant source of bags for other things, like putting my used underwear in during trips, etc.

I will also have to pay for food stamp users to get for free the bags that I have to pay extra for. Plus, the additional expense (water in our drought stricken Southern California, detergent, electricity for the washer and dryer, and wear and tear on the machinery, plus an increase in transportation energy costs for hauling the extra weight around) for maintaining a laundry load of the re-usable bags, because just my wife and I by ourselves use enough bags each trip to the store to be just about a full load. Plus the upfront cost of buying the re-usable bags.

Once again, the government not only wants to run more of my life, it wants to make sure I pay extra for the privilege,

Ron19

“Looking at the abundance and size of Louisiana white and brown shrimp before and after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill””

Remember the Exon Valdez oil spill in Alaska?

The areas that were cleaned up by the government and the environmentalists took much longer to recover than the areas that were untouched by the cleanup effort.

Jose

–History has yet to be written–

I’ve been reading The Zimmermann Telegram by Barbara Tuchman. She describes a number of events leading up to the US involvement in WW1, The main subject is a telegram, written by German diplomat Arthur Zimmerman to Mexico promising support if Mexico would ally with Japan and attack the US. The intention was to keep the US out of the war in Europe.

The message also revealed the German intention to open unrestricted Uboat attacks on all US shipping.

The telegram was intercepted and decoded by the Brits, who handed it over to the US, thinking it would cement US support in the war.

The amazing thing is Woodrow Wilson’s blind determination to avoid war at any cost. He persisted in pushing for peace negotiations long after both sides made it clear that they could not accept less than victory. Both sides were almost bankrupt and would not accept any settlement that did not include enough gains to offset their loses.

Wilson keep pushing on, refused to meet with his own diplomats who had opposing (and better informed) views, and would not even read their correspondence. He was convinced he had a better understanding of events and knew better than any of his advisers.

At the beginning of the war the British had cut all transatlantic telegraph cables used by the Germans, who then had to rely on snail mail to communicate outside of Europe. They convinced Wilson to allow them to use US cables to communicate across the Atlantic. He allowed them to send encrypted messages over lines controlled by the US State Department! The Sec of State protested constantly but Wilson personally authorized each message. The Germans convinced him they would only send messages supporting peace negotiations, but in fact sent the Zimmermann telegram and other subversive communications though our own government’s communication system!

Even when the Zimmermann telegram was revealed to Wilson, he refused to consider hostilities against the Germans. He was totally blinded by naivete, ideology, and belief in his own superior abilities to resolve hostilities.

I have heard comparisons between Wilson and Obama before, but as I keep reading I am astounded by the similarities between the two. As far as the Leftist claim to being on the right side of history, they should study the subject first!

Jose

“Did Jerry Brown sign a good gun bill or a bad gun bill?”

It’s a bad bill. The intent may have been good, but it will be abused in execution.